Pacita Abad
in ‘Looking Back | The 16th White Columns, New York
16 January – 28 February 2026
Pacita Abad, Indigo Blue, 1991 © Pacita Abad Art Estate
Pacita Abad is included in this year’s White Columns Annual, organised by New York based curator Augusto Arbizo.
As with previous ‘Annuals’ an individual or a collaborative team (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) is invited to organise an exhibition based on their personal experiences and interactions with art in New York City during the previous year. In a very straightforward way, the ‘Annual’ exhibitions hope to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate – and engage with – New York’s constantly shifting cultural landscapes.
Speaking about the exhibition, Arbizo observed: ‘New York art-viewing in 2025 felt unusually generous, shaped for me by a series of charged encounters across galleries, museums, artist studios, and art fairs. The works gathered here share an ethos of obsession and relentlessness—artists pressing their ideas and processes to the edge, testing what inherited forms can still hold. Looking Back offers only a partial glimpse of a year rich with work often experienced quickly— absorbed in brief moments, and sometimes repeated viewings, yet holding attention and staying present.’
Abad’s work is exhibited alongside including Marsha Cottrell, Willem de Kooning, Kenichiro Fukumoto, Hardy Hill, Miranda Lichtenstein, Brandon Morris, Dona Nelson, Yu Nishimura, Mira Schendel, Mary Stephenson, Tanaka, Salman Toor, Jack Whitten.